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Bestselling author Wade Davis is enthralled by ancient Polynesians who faced the open sea and chose to travel out of the “sheer courage” of true exploration. Here, he joins modern-day Polynesian navigators aboard the Hokule'a, a replica of the great seafaring canoes – a 62-foot-long, 19-foot-wide open-decked catamaran, lashed together by eight kilometres of rope and guided not by technology but lessons passed through generations.

Clouds also provide clues to the wayfinder – their shape, colour, character, and place in the sky. Light can be read, the rainbow colours at the edge of stars, the way they twinkle and dim with an impending storm, the tone of the sky over an island, always darker than that over open sea. A halo around the moon foreshadows rain, for it is caused by light shining through ice crystals of clouds laden with moisture. The number of stars within the halo anticipates the intensity of the storm; if there are fewer than 10, expect trouble, high winds and torrential rain. If a double halo surrounds the moon, the weather will move in on the wings of a gale.

Other signs are found in wildlife and seamarks, as opposed to landmarks. Dolphins and porpoises swimming toward sheltered waters herald a storm, while the flight of a frigate bird heading out to sea anticipates calm. Pelagic birds like the albatross lead nowhere, but others such as petrels and terns travel fixed distances from their nests, returning every night to land, rising out of the waves at sunset, their flight paths home as precise as compass bearings.

Phosphorescence and the debris of plants in the sea, the salinity and taste and temperature of the water, all these become revelatory in the senses of the navigator.

All of this made sense until we rounded the backside of Molokai and in the darkness of night sailed north into the face of a distant storm. But it was one thing to know what to look for, these clues and signs and indications; it was quite another to pull it all together and confront in the moment the ever-changing power and reality of the sea.

Like Nainoa Thompson, an experienced Hawaiian navigator, and all of the experienced crew, Ka'iulani (Nainoa's protégé) could name and follow some 220 stars in the night sky. She knew and could track all the constellations, but for her the most important stars were those low in the sky, the ones that had just risen or were about to set. Nainoa explained: As the Earth rotates, every star comes up over the eastern horizon, describes an arc through the sky, and then sets on a westerly bearing. These two points on the horizon, where a specific star rises in the east and sets in the west, remain the same throughout the year, though the time at which a star emerges changes by four minutes every night. Thus, as long as one is able to commit to memory all the stars and their unique positions, the time at which each is to appear on a particular night, and their bearings as they break the horizon or slip beneath it, one can envision a 360-degree compass, which the Hawaiians divide conceptually into the 32 star houses, each a segment on the horizon named for a celestial body. Any one star is only dependable for a time, for as it arcs through the sky its bearings change. But by then there will be another star breaking the horizon, again on a bearing known to the navigator. Over the course of a night at sea – roughly 12 hours in the tropics – 10 such guiding stars are enough to maintain a course. To steer, the crew at the helm, instructed by the navigator, takes advantage of the canoe itself, positioning the vessel so that a particular star or celestial body remains framed, for example, within the angle subtended between the top of the mast and stays that support it. Any consistent point of reference will do.

The stern of the Hokule'a is square, which allows the navigator readily to orient to east and west at both sunset and break of day. There are eight marks incised along the railings on both sides of the vessel, each paired to a single point in the stern, giving bearings in two directions, fore and aft – 32 bearings altogether, which correspond to the 32 directional houses of the star compass. The navigator by day conceptually divides the horizon ahead and behind, each into 16 parts, taking as cardinal points the rising and setting of the sun. Thus by day he or she replicates the star compass of the night. The metaphor is that the Hokule'a never moves. It simply waits, the axis mundi of the world, as the islands rise out of the sea to greet her.

Beyond sun and stars is the ocean itself. When clouds or mist obliterate the horizon, the navigator must orient the vessel by the feel of the water, distinguishing waves created by local weather systems, for example, from the swells generated by pressure systems far beyond the horizon. And these swells, in turn, must be differentiated from the deep ocean currents that run through the Pacific, and which can be followed with the same ease with which a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to its mouth. Expert navigators like Mau Piailug, Nainoa's teacher, sitting alone in the darkness of the hull of a canoe, can sense and distinguish as many as five distinct swells moving through the vessel at any given time. Should the canoe shift course in the middle of the night, the navigator will know, simply from the change of the pitch and roll of the waves. Even more remarkable is the navigator's ability to pull islands out of the sea. Truly great navigators can identify the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of the canoe, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its own refractive pattern that can be read with the same ease with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint.

All of this is extraordinary, each one of these individual skills and intuitions a sign of certain brilliance. What is even more astonishing is that the entire science of wayfinding is based on dead reckoning. You only know where you are by knowing precisely where you have been and how you got to where you are.

Excerpted from the just-released 2009 CBC Massey Lectures, The Wayfinders: Why Ancient Wisdom Matters in the Modern World, by Wade Davis. Copyright © Wade Davis, reprinted by permission of House of Anansi Press.